My pathetic little pumpkin vine was so far gone I finally picked the two little pumpkins that managed to grow this year. They're adorable, I love the colour and the little pink blush. You can see the stems are dried-looking but still very green. You're meant to leave pumpkins until the stems are brown, dried and dead looking. Well the rest of the plant was brown, dried and dead, it didn't have one green leaf left, so I took what I could get!They went into a pumpkin soup last night. Not the best soup but it could be because they were under-mature. Not green inside or anything, just didn't have that rich savoury full flavour.
You can also see a lovely little melon on my lap, the second of my Minnesota midgets. It's the largest one, it just looks so inviting with those bulging ridges. Unfortunately after getting 60mm of rain in a single weekend not long ago, the melon was once again flooded with too much liquid and this time ended up tasting a bit over-ripe. I also have to be careful because unlike store-bought cantaloupe, this variety stays fairly green when it's ripe. But I'll definitely grow them again next year, they're fun!
The edamame are finally starting to fully ripen. Just look at how heavy with beans the plant is! The rest of the plant is in tatters but it's heavy with beans. I haven't had a chance to try them yet.On the other hand, my potatoes are once again pathetic. I actually managed to get more potatoes last year, growing them late in the season, than this year. They were getting so mite-eaten and caterpillar-munched that there wasn't much green left on them. You're meant to leave them until they turn yellow and die off before harvesting but I didn't think the tops would survive much longer. This is all I got for this year's trouble.
I won't bother next year, two years of failure in a row are enough for me. But a word of advice to others. Both times I tried a method people keep swearing works: you plant the potatoes low down in the pot, and as the greens grow you bury more and more of the plant until the pot is full of dirt. Supposedly potatoes are meant to grow all the way up the buried stalk. But both years all I got were a few potatoes at the very bottom, and a very long stalk. I actually wonder if the plant has been wasting energy growing a longer stalk that it should be putting into its potatoes!
And finally, not a harvest but a note on my new plantings. This is a busy time of year for the cabbage white butterfly, when people are starting to plant brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and kale) but it's still warm enough for the butterflies to breed. Sure enough, almost every day I check my sprouts and find half a dozen white eggs under the leaves. I've already had to pick off two tiny caterpillars too. So beware gardeners! Even my butterfly decoys haven't helped one bit. The lure of the brassicas is just too much. But on the plus side, my brassicas are powering along in this wonderful weather we've been having! Just when I thought autumn had arrived, we've gotten another flush of 25+ weather. And it seems Melbourne has had over 100 days in a row where the high always hit 20C or above. This has blown away the previous record of 78 days in a row in 2000-01 ... oh and there's at least another week of 20+ weather forecast.
My potatoes started dying back which meant they were ready for harvesting. I didn't get very many spuds at all - just what you see in this photo plus two more little ones that fell off when I pulled the plants up. I don't know why there were so few, my guess is not enough sunlight. Oh well, if it was just sunlight than I'll have better luck over the summer when the sun is higher. At this time of year the garage puts most of the yard in shade most of the day.
I thought I'd update on some of my veggies. First the good news - my pumpkins are starting to look almost ripe. You can tell they're ripe when the "stem dries out", or something like that. And look! One of my pumpkins is starting to look brown on the stem, sort of dried out and cracked. 
By comparison, this is what the other stems look like. They've always been yellow, but bright and alive, not dull and brown. Looks like I'll be harvesting soonish!
On a sadder note, I think my potatoes have carked it. I thought they wilted from the heat wave, but unlike my other pot plants they didn't recover. And as I 
To investigate I dug right down and pulled on of them out. This is what the root looked like. Not many roots at all, really, and still most of the seed potato attached. No baby potatoes at all. The soil was fairly damp too so my guess is that they're rotting from too much moisture. I must have watered them too much in this heat - I must remember that these big pots hold in the moisture very well. I've left one potato though ... I'm probably kidding myself but we'll see if it survives the week.
I also had to pull up my capsicum. All of the fruit were rotting, it simply was not happy. And when I did so I picked a few carrots to see how they were going. This shows you the difference in growth based on how much sun they get. I planted all of my carrots at the same time, but the small ones were in the shade of the capsicum. That's all the green growth they had, and as you can see their roots didn't get very far. The bigger one was in one of the sunnier spots, but still took a while to grow even that big, still only half the size of one from the supermarket.
I have another garden mystery. What you see here is a potato I cut in half and put in the bottom of this big pot with some potting soil. It looks like I got two sprouts from one half (on the left) and one from the other. As they grew up I kept burying them with layers of manure, sugar cane mulch and compost from my heap.